Nutanix software provides a hyperconverged platform that uses Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) to share and present local storage to all the virtual machines in the cluster. The general XC Series Nutanix architecture is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.              Nutanix architecture

Acropolis DSF virtualizes the storage across all nodes and presents the same to the hypervisor as one large pool of shared storage. The DSF replicates writes synchronously to at least one remote XC Nutanix node to ensure cluster resiliency and availability. Local storage for each XC Nutanix node in the architecture is presented as one large pool of shared storage to hypervisor.

Each node runs an industry-standard hypervisor — VMware ESXi, Microsoft, Hyper-V, or Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) — and the Nutanix Controller VM (CVM). The Nutanix CVM runs the Nutanix software and serves I/O operations for the hypervisor and all VMs running on that host. Each CVM connects directly to the local storage controller and its associated disks thereby reducing the storage I/O latency. The data locality feature ensures virtual machine I/Os are always served by the local CVM on the same hypervisor node, improving the VM I/O performance regardless of where it runs.